How Do I Get My Website into Digg
September 21st, 2006 by Michael Gray in Social NetworksIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
One of the more frequent questions I get from people via email is ‘How do I get my website into digg‘. Since I’ve been doing the Social Media Optimization thing lately I can share a few tips with you.
What’s my number one tip for getting more out of any social community site whether it’s Digg, YouTube, MySpace, or anything else, write great content. C’mon Gray is that the best you’ve got, I’m sure you got a treasure chest full tricks up your sleeve, and you’re going to go all white hat on us? See here’s the thing Social Community sites thrive on the efforts of people, whereas search engine algorthyms don’t (at least not in any significantly meaningful way yet). You can create as many sock puppet accounts as you want, have an army of clickers running multiple clickbots voting and pumping your story up. When people start to see it and if your content can’t stand on it’s own two feet, it will get buried. So what is this great content that everyone keeps talking about, that’s the $64 question …
Let’s preface my story a little bit, for all intents and purposes I’m a one man show. Sure I have some people who write for me, and I occasionally outsource some link building, and maybe a design job or two, but I do the bulk of the work. Most of my projects don’t have lavish budgets, in fact usually I’m bootstrapping my way to the top. My most successful social bookmarking efforts involve infotainment. This infotainment approach is almost certainly the byproduct of watching too much Sesame Street, School House Rock and MTV during my early years. What is infotainment you ask?
Infotainment is that magical mixture of education, information and entertainment. You can be educating and informative much like a high school history teacher, however since you aren’t entertaining most of your students will fall asleep on you. You can be entertaining, say like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, but no one will respect you or look to you as an authoritative fountain of wisdom, they will look for you to make an ass of yourself purely for their enjoyment. How do you find that magical blend of information and entertainment, that my friends is the real diamond.
Solve a problem. Solving big problems like finding a cure for cancer are amazing, but so are solving little ones like helping people back up their hard drive or find cheaper gas prices. The more pressing the problem you solve, the less entertaining you are going to have to be to compensate for it.
Let me Entertain You. What if you provide a service or product for which the problem has already been solved? Then you are going to have to be more entertaining. For example everyone needs car insurance, but there’s no shortage of insurance providers, so there’s no real car insurance problem. However if you use entertainment you can sell your services through the back door. Geico does this very well their TV commercials. On the web how about collecting funny auto accident pictures with a short story.
Be Compelling and Hook Me in. Your title needs to be compelling enough that when I see it I’ll feel like I’m missing out on something if I don’t read it. For example would you rather read ‘How to make your marital relations with your spouse better‘ or ‘5 Sex Secrets Your Wife Wished You Knew‘. Just remeber after you got me hooked make sure you follow through and give me the goods (see Does Your Follow Through Suck)
Star the Ball Rolling. I’m sure I’m going to cause social bookmarkers across the globe to call me a spammer but hear me out. I firmly believe you should start the ball rolling and submit your own sites. Why, well if you’ve spent all that time creating great content, that’s informative, entertaining, and compelling why leave the most crucial step to chance? Additionally you want to craft your anchor text to give you the most value and give your story the most mileage. This is not a step you want to leave in the hands of an amateur or casual user. That said you do have to practice responsibility. Don’t submit crap, only submit the really good stuff, the cream of the crop. Don’t only submit your own stories, if you do you look like putz who’s not a valued member. So submit other people’s sites, digg other stories that you think are interesing, people are much more tolerant of shameless self promotion from responsible community members, than drive by link droppers.
Help Out your Friends. We’ve all got friends and other people we know online, if you’ve got a great story feel free to point it out to them and ask them to ‘digg it’ if they think it’s good. If it is good they won’t feel bad helping promote it, and you won’t feel bad asking them. If it’s crap then you’ve got a problem. Expect this to be reciprocal and get requests from your friends. If their stories are good you shouldn’t have a problem helping them promote them. If there stories aren’t good, see if you can offer some constructive criticism to help them make it better.
So let’s wrap this all up:
- Create useful content that solves a problem, need, or question people have.
- Be entertaining, remember no one wants to feel like they are in school learning something make it fun
- Be compelling, make your title enticing enough to make me want to read more
- Start the process, start things moving in the right direction, without abusing the community
- Ask your friends for help promoting your work, be prepared to return the favor
And hey if you liked this story don’t forget to bookmark it below 
Sphere It
September 21st, 2006 at 8:46 am
I have dugg about three of my own stories, and one made it to the front page. The funny thing that I found, was that the one digg that I thought way sure to take off only got three diggs total, while the one that I considered more ordinary was huge.
In the end, you don’t really get to decide which of your diggs are popular. Having friends help digg your stuff is almost as importance as the quality of the content you are digging itself.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:57 am
Dugg
September 21st, 2006 at 10:44 am
Great remark about infotainment. Can I add some more ideas about content?
- find sneaky/appealing details about most commented topics (politics, sports, vips)
- make fun of the latest trends
- how-to about any well known problem using very simple solutions
September 21st, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Dugg!
September 21st, 2006 at 11:07 pm
In case you needed an example of something that solves a “problem” and is entertaining…
http://www.deepastronomy.com/how-to-destroy-earth-with-a-coffee-can.html
This one made it to the front page and according to his comment at ProBlogger got about 30k+ visits.
He picked up most of the other elements mentioned except starting the ball himself.
Of course knowing all of the above and actually doing it… succesfully… two different things.
September 22nd, 2006 at 2:57 am
I find your attempts to game social bookmarking sites offensive, and will in no way support it.
September 22nd, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Dugg! Very comprehensive - I pretty much agree
with all of it.
The problem I see with Digg is that unless you
can get a bunch of diggs very quickly after you
submit a story (the army of clickers/clickbots/
bunch of friends standing by on IM), the story
may not stay on the Upcoming stories page
long enough for many people to see it/vote on it.
I submitted one of my blog posts to digg (yes,
I’m not too proud), and happened to be watching
the Spy: Watch in Real-time page, and within
10 seconds of submitting, saw the
“[Ok, this is lame]” comment in the Who or Why
column, and the article immediately disappeared
off the Upcoming Stories page.
So, ok, maybe the post was lame, or not - but
my point is that it was essentially canned by
one user with high authority and most
users never got to see it; and I don’t see how
this one user could possibly have read more than
the title in a few seconds. How is that
democratic?
I’ve had other posts get some diggs, so I’m not
- just pointing
a totally disgruntled user
out what I saw. Perhaps I misinterpreted what
actually happened?
March 18th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
this is cool
June 5th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Great tips, also commenting on other Dugg posts and buiding a reputation in the Digg community can help. I am yet to make the front page but by doing this the average number of Diggs for my posts rose from 2/3 from 9/10.